Content and Stuff

Tuesday, 20 September 2016

Maybe Call of Duty Should Stop Making So Many Sequels

Call of Duty was a series that got its start in 2003, which I bet a whole bunch of the embryos that populate modern CoD servers weren't aware of and it's a series that I didn't have much interest in for the longest time. A younger me would have looked at something like Call of Duty which was set during World War 2 and then I'd look at something like Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem or Unreal and I think I'd much rather play a game like that over something all gritty and realistic.

But then 2007 rolled along and out came Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and at the time it really did blow me away. People had liked CoD in the past but no one in my circle of friends had ever raved about a game in the series as much as they were with Modern Warfare so of course I end up trying it and really enjoying it. The game was just generally really fun and the multiplayer really helped give it some sticking power. I remember thinking at the time that this was easily the best console FPS multiplayer experience I ever had but my expectations were particularly low after trying out F.EA.R and Prey's multiplayer modes.

Fast forward to 2016 and I had to do a google search to find out what Call of Duty is up to now. I had no idea what the fuck Infinite Warfare is but I think the series has gone all spacy and science fiction with multiplayer looking more like a slowed down, shit version of Unreal or something (in Black Ops 3 at least) rather than an actual Call of Duty. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with this, it just seems that since I dropped off the series has taken a weird direction. That doesn't mean however that the game has lost any traction by the sounds of things, there always seems to be some degree of hype for the latest installment and the multiplayer modes always seem well populated.

However a week ago I stumbled across an article on GameSpot that said "There will always be Call of Duty games", here's the link

I'd be upset by this if I was a fan of the series. Every time there is a new Call of Duty game you have to shell out full price and these games come out yearly. Sure, you can linger around on the old games for a while but if you're into the multiplayer, which most are, you WILL have to move to the next game or else be completely left behind. Every goddamn year another full priced game with the inevitable DLC map packs that you'll have to buy a couple of months down the line. The sheer blatancy of the money grubbing here is astounding and I'm actually baffled as to why there aren't huge numbers of fans just putting their foot down and saying "no".

Just look at Counter Strike as a great counter example of this. Counter Strike Source was bundled with Half Life 2, a game that every man and his dog had, back in 2004 and then Global Offensive came out in 2012. That's an 8 year gap and the game is consistently populated with a large number of players

To top that off the game is only like £12 and you don't have to worry about another one coming out in the next 6 months. Sure, you can shell out extra cash for a few maps or to get some skins for your guns but this shit is all optional and you won't have trouble finding matches without the extras because despite having not played for a long time I'm sure DE_Dust2 is still a thing.

The fast sequel thing really turns me off to the series. The game doesn't look shit by any means, it looks well polished and fun to play but the fact that I know Infinite Warfare will be perma-shelved in 2017 for the next one makes me not want to buy it. I wish they could just give us ONE game that they update constantly with lots of cool shit rather than this yearly release stuff. It's not like you couldn't have WW2, Modern Day and Sci-Fi War shit all in one game and just release it as a stand alone multiplayer experience at this point. Still, if they did stop they might lose their license to print money so I guess the sequels will never end.